Issues → July/August 2007 → Feature Stories →
Lyme Disease: One Woman's Journey
(page 5 of 8)
"We moved here to be in the country," she explains. "We built a treehouse for our sons at the edge of the field, and that of course is where the ticks are. And then we found out about Lyme. We had no idea." Georgina is a neurologist; her husband is an immunologist. "The problem is, we've got too many deer," she adds. "Why would anyone tolerate a problem that's destroying the woodlands, causing fatal car accidents, and spreading disease?"
Last summer, Georgina and her husband took a trip to Maine and stayed on Monhegan Island, where there are few ticks. "It was wonderful to be somewhere where they weren't," she notes. But it wasn't always so.
On Monhegan Island, a little rock of a place 10 miles out in the ocean off the coast of Maine, Peter Rand, M.D., and his band of fellow sleuths at the Maine Medical Center Research Institute have spent almost 20 years studying the relationships among deer, rats, and ticks, and how their population levels correlate with the spread of Lyme disease. "Oh, I'd love to write a book about all this," says Rand, a handsome man in his 70s, with a full head of white hair and a patrician bearing. From his office in South Portland, he loves to tell the story, an adventurous tale of trips to the island on the high seas, collecting ticks in the snow, and late-night sessions around a roaring fire, the team talking about the future of their research. "The beauty of the island was that it was contained," Rand explains. A scientist's dream.
For part of that time, most of the 75 full-time residents of Monhegan acted as guinea pigs; the island's little general store became their makeshift clinic. "The people would come down and put their arms on the meat counter, and we'd draw blood," Rand recalls. Dogs and cats were tested, too. He sometimes felt as though he were on the set of M*A*S*H.
His team worked like that for 13 years: "We found that as the years went on, up to 13 percent of the island's residents had Lyme." The local fear was that the presence of the disease would scare away visitors, who provide Monhegan with vital revenue. And so, after furious debate, residents agreed to have all the deer killed. Between 1996 and 1999, more than 100 deer were shot and their carcasses processed (the meat was donated to food banks), effectively removing the most active tick host from that island. And now, six years later, Lyme is rare on Monhegan. Rand's study was a triumph in the annals of Lyme disease prevention.
One comment I heard more than once is that Lyme doesn't kill you -- but you wish it would. In Brunswick, Maine, I visited Rita Losee, a little fireball of a redhead who was once a nurse and a triathlete. Bitten by a tick while hiking the Appalachian Trail, she was diagnosed quickly, but when she'd finished the recommended course of antibiotics, her symptoms returned. "There were three or four times when the pain was so awful, I was within days of killing myself," she remembers. Her doctor changed her diagnosis to chronic fatigue syndrome. At first she believed him -- but then she started researching on her own. "I convinced my doctor to put me back on antibiotics," she says, "and I started to feel better again."
The mysteries of Lyme haunt her: "One of the things that really puzzles me is that so many doctors refuse to know about Lyme. I was in touch with one doctor, and he and his family all had Lyme. I called him up and he said, 'I don't want to talk about this on the phone,' and he invited me over. I felt as if I were in a Kafka novel. I've never felt anything like this, the strange energy that surrounds Lyme. I asked him about it, and he talked about the denial that exists around Lyme. And then he told me that there was a writer for Newsday who started investigating, and he traced the whole thing to a little island off Long Island where the United States has a biological factory, and that this Lyme bug was an escapee."
Reader Comments
Comment from Donna Zuk on June 6, 2008
I have Yankee magazine emailed to me every month, but in June last year I moved back to Connecticut after spending 2 years in North Carolina near my grandchildren and missed this article until now. I have been having weird ripping pains in my hands that heal in about 4 days only to return. I could hardly hold a pen today with sharp pains shooting in my hand whenever I tried to do normal activities. After a year of this, and it not getting better today after my usual 4 days or so of healing, I decided to go to the walk-in. I have lab work that I have to get done, and I noticed a Lymes disease test.
Funny thing I thought. Many years ago (16) a doctor tested me for hypothyroidism, Lymes, and Epstein Barr/mono. The Lymes and thyroid tests were negative. The Epstein Barr titer test was positive. I was diagnosed with Chronic Epstein Barr.
Years later after getting a tetanus shot, weird things began happening. Pain, severe pain, muscle spasms and muscle jerks spread all over my body, then 2 months later burning, boiling pain. Tender pain I used to call "it feels like raw hamburg pain." Then if I did some sit ups, I would have serious tender pain between my muscles and rib bones. I'd say, it feels like someone hit me with a baseball bat multiple times. My exhaustion for years continued. I would wish for death. I would cry from the pain and exhaustion. I didn't want to be in a relationship so they wouldn't have to deal with my limited life.
After seeing multiple doctors, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. I always feel sick. I have a hard time getting up in the morning and a hard time falling asleep, or staying asleep. I always hurt.
I came home tonight with thoughts of the meaning of my painful hand symptoms and what they might have to do with Lymes disease? I began my internet search again. Again I was reminded of another search I had done, and the tell-tale sign of the bulls eye rash. It's a funny thing because I had that once... (27 years ago) more than one on the same leg, so I counted it out. It was more than one area so it can't be Lymes. The Lymes test was negative, and there was also more than one bulls eye area at the same time (and it didn't get better). Then I read on the net, you can have more than one even if there's only one bite.
Ok, so now I continue searching trying to find any type of bite that might have the look of my bulls eye. My bulls eye was not the red rash. I distinctly remembered mine were bruises. You can imagine after all these years of never mentioning it to a doctor. I am now a nurse, (and after 19 years of nursing at 50 years old going back to college because my repetitive 'injuries' and exhaustion is making life miserable if not impossible at times) I was not a nurse when I had these bulls eyes but niether was I taught about lymes disease in nursing... never mind atypical BRUISE-type bulls eyes! Thank you so much for this article, and please, please thank that nurse!
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